Pottz dot net - Web Ramblings

Meet Casey Serin, an American blogger who’s managed to turn notoriety into a good little earner. His predicament is but a blip on the radar of reckless behaviour that would have gone unnoticed but for the fact he began blogging about it.

In one year, the 24-year-old website designer turned real estate flipper bought eight homes in four states — and in every case but one, he put no money down. At his peak, in April, Serin had $93,000 he’d taken out of the homes as he bought them. By July, he was broke, desperate for one last deal.

His blog - iamfacingforeclosure.com (or IAFF, for short) - started as a cautionary tale to warn other would-be investors of the pitfalls of property speculation. But it unexpectedly turned its author into the punching bag of the World Wide Web.

He has been mocked, pilloried, hounded and harangued in a way that would have driven most others to abandon their blogs, disconnect their computers and head for the hills.

His critics, have turned their pursuit of the American into a blood sport in which they vie with one another to pour industrial-strength vitriol onto their quarry and derail his efforts to redeem himself.

And each day the haterz pepper his blog posts with snide comments, gratuitous advice and fill his inbox with invective, accusing him of cheating, lying, slacking off and deserting his wife.

Leveraging” is one of Serin’s two favourite words. The other is “monetise”. He uses them a lot. And although he didn’t say it in as many words, what Serin is doing is leveraging his notoriety so that he can monetise his blog and other projects.

The ads in Serin blog currently earn him between $US2000 and $US3000 a month, a figure he hopes to be able to boost up to $US4000 by July. And that all depends on keeping his audience, which requires him to stick his head up from time to time so he can get whacked.

“That [income from the blog] is a really good thing for me because I’m able to have some income and pay for expenses as I’m working on higher leveraged things, like working on a book,” he says.

Serin’s story is a tragic tale of how one young man plunged into the real estate market thinking he could make a quick killing by “flipping” properties - buying low, selling high and pocketing the profit. Big mistake!

The banks have now foreclosed on six of the eight properties and Serin is waiting to see the final tally that he is going to be asked to repay.

Ultimately Casey Serin realises that his reputation is such that no one in their right mind is going to employ him in a “normal” job. So his only hope is, as he puts it, to use the publicity he’s getting to earn an income - in other words to monetise that publicity.

Serin’s story is a tragic tale of how one young man plunged into the real estate market thinking he could make a quick killing by “flipping” properties - buying low, selling high and pocketing the profit.

But Serin’s execution was so inept that he soon found himself with $US2.2 million in borrowings and saddled with eight properties, most of which he had purchased with 100 per cent loans.

Some he paid too much for, some needed more extensive repairs than first thought and this was all happening as the property market began to soften.

USA Today is one of many media outlets that have used Serin to illustrate reports about the bursting of the US property bubble. The newspaper called him the “poster child for everything that went wrong in the real estate boom”.